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Judy Rae Grahn was born in Chicago, Illinois. Her father was a cook and her mother was a photographer's assistant. Grahn described her childhood as taking place in "an economically poor and spiritually depressed late 1950s New Mexico desert town near the hellish border of West Texas."

At 18 she eloped with a student at a nearby college named Yvonne. Grahan credits Yvonne with opening her eyes to gay culture. Soon thereafter she would join the United States Air Force. At 21 she was discharged (in a "less than honorable," manner, she stated) for being a lesbian.[1]

Grahn would move to the west coast where she would become active in the feminist poetry movement of the 1970s. She earned a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Integral Studies.[2]

Grahn lives in California and teaches at the California Institute for Integral Studies, the New College of California, and the Institute for Transpersonal Psychology.[2]

In 1969, Grahn co-founded the Women's Press Collective the San Francisco Bay Area. She also was a founding member of the West Coast New Lesbian Feminist Movement.[2]

With this poem, the whole political enterprise of feminism was subsumed by poetic means into an understanding of the complexity of the stark power relations that involve gender, race, and sexuality.Honor Moore, on hearing Judy Grahn read her poem "A Woman is Talking to Death," in the early 1970s.[2]

Grahn's poetry is at times free verse, covering mainly feminist and lesbian subjects and themes. She uses plain language and what the Poetry Foundation describes as an "etymological curiosity that often eschews metaphor in favor of incantation."[2] Grahn does not limit her work to just written poetry, but also collaborates with other artists such as singer-songwriter Anne Carol Mitchell and dancer and choreographer Anne Blethenthal.[2]

Grahn co-edits the online journal Metaformia, a journal about menstruation and women's culture.[2]

Her debut poetry collection, Edward the Dyke, and other poems was released in 1971, and was combined with She Who (1972) and A Woman is Talking to Death (1974) in a collected edition titled The Words of a Common Woman in 1978.